10/19/2010 @ 6:00PM

What Makes People Powerful

Why are some people incredibly powerful? Are there certain traits that we can learn from the Steve Jobses of the world?

A new book from Stanford University professor Jeffrey Pfeffer, Ph.D., delves into this very issue. Pfeffer, a professor of organizational behavior at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, released his book, Power: Why Some People Have it and Others Don’t last month. Pfeffer’s argument is that there’s a crucial skill set that separates alphas like Steve Jobs and
Google
cofounder Larry Page from the omegas–and that potentially matters more than I.Q., charisma, and even hard work.

“It’s insufficient to presume that success is based on the quality of your work and job performance,” Pfeffer said. “Your success involves your ability to deal with workplace politics.” Pfeffer supports the thesis of his book by citing peer-reviewed studies and his own research.

According to Pfeffer, political skills and strategies, such as managing others’ perceptions about your accomplishments, separate workplace winners from those who don’t move up the ladder. One example is going out of your way to build a reputation in your field.

“There’s a woman I talk about in this book who went to work for a financial management firm in San Francisco,” says Pfeffer. “The firm would have discussions about their blog strategy. Everyone else was too busy, but she took it on, and eventually she found herself a job in a big Internet conglomerate, because people read her blog.”

Pfeffer also says the career-minded employee should cultivate relationships not only with co-workers, but throughout his or her industry. “You ought to think about the extensiveness, context and content of your social network–and I don’t mean your billion Facebook friends,” he explains. “Worry about spending too much time with people you know, as opposed to meeting new people in unrelated areas.”

Pfeffer said his book uses anecdotes from the lives of ordinary people–like the woman at the San Francisco firm–to make his advice more accessible. But he said those lessons still apply even at the highest levels. Case in point, Pfeffer said, the fall of former
Hewlett-Packard
Chief Executive Mark Hurd, who in August resigned after an investigation found he had violated HP’s “Standards of Business Conduct.” (Not long afterward billionaire software mogul Larry Ellison offered Hurd a job as co-president of
Oracle
.)

“The most important lesson there is that part of the price of power when you reach a high level in any sphere-public, private, or nonprofit–is that you’re under constant public scrutiny,” says Pfeffer.

Other heavy-hitters have lessons to teach as well, says Pfeffer. “Bill Clinton, Nancy Pelosi … [they] got to where they are because they understood how to get other people to sponsor and support them,” he points out. By contrast, “if you lose your job, it’s a sign you’ve done something incorrectly. [Carly Fiorina] didn’t leave HP voluntarily. So whether or not she did a good job at HP, she didn’t do a good job managing her relationship with the board of directors.”

Pfeffer says the success of
Apple
cofounder Steve Jobs shows that it is better to be respected than loved. “He’s very tough,” Pfeffer says of Jobs. “He illustrates another principle, which is that likability is highly overrated. If you get power, the likeability will follow. People love to be associated with success.”

While the Hurd affair demonstrates the need for business top dogs to manage their public images as carefully as any professional politician, the information technology revolution has made everyone’s lives less private, a trend perhaps best demonstrated by instances of workers being fired for posting compromising information about themselves on social networking sites. But Pfeffer says his observations regarding workplace politics aren’t in danger of becoming obsolete due to technological developments. In fact, he says his experience showed such developments weren’t changing people’s behavior.

“People ultimately forget that they’re under observation,” he says. “The ones who aren’t conscious of their behavior now and aren’t strategic about it will continue not to be, even with new technology. Some people are thoughtful about that sort of thing, and some people aren’t.”

So can the traits of the world’s most powerful people be learned? Only if people are willing to change. And Pfeffer says the most important part of our workplace today–the human being–hasn’t changed much.